Galactic North

  Van Ness sounded suddenly interested. “Interrogate her, you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that, Captain. But we might want to ask her a few questions.”

  “We’d be playing with fire. You know they can make things happen just by thinking about them.”

  “She’ll have no reason to hurt us. We’ll have saved her life just by taking her off the Cockatrice.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want it saved. Have you thought of that?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we find her, Captain.”

  He pulled a face, that part of his visage still capable of making expressions, at least. “I’ll give you another twelve hours, lad. That’s my limit. Then we put as much distance between us and that wreck as God and physics will allow.”

  I nodded, knowing that it was pointless to expect more of Van Ness. He’d already shown great forbearance in allowing us to delay the departure for so long. Given his feelings regarding Conjoiners, I wasn’t going to push for any more time.

  We caught her eleven hours later. We’d driven her as far as she could go, blocking her escape routes by blowing the few surrounding volumes that were still pressurised. I was the first to speak to her, when we finally had her cornered.

  I pushed up the visor of my helmet, breathing stale air so that we could speak. She was huddled in a corner, compressed like some animal ready to bolt or strike.

  “Stop running from us,” I said, as my lamp pinned her down and forced her to squint. “There’s nowhere left to go, and even if there was, we don’t want to hurt you. Whatever these people did to you, whatever they made you do, we’re not like them.”

  She hissed back, “You’re Ultras. That’s all I need to know.”

  “We’re Ultras, yes, but we still want to help you. Our captain just wants to get away from this time bomb as quickly as possible. I talked him into giving us a few extra hours to find you. You can come with us whenever you like. But if you’d rather stay aboard this ship . . .”

  She stared back at me and said nothing. I couldn’t guess her age. She had the face of a girl, but there was a steely resolution in her olive-green eyes that told me she was older than she looked.

  “I’m Inigo, the shipmaster from the Petronel,” I said, hoping that my smile looked reassuring rather than threatening. I reached out my hand, my right one, and she flinched back. Even suited, even hidden under a glove, my hand was obviously mechanical. “Please,” I continued, “come with us. We’ll treat you well and get you back to your people.”

  “Why?” she snarled. “Why do you care?”

  “Because we’re not all the same,” I said. “And you need to believe it, or you’re going to die here when we leave. Captain wants us to secure for thrust in less than an hour. So come on.”

  “What happened?” she asked, looking around at the damaged compartment in which she had been cornered. “I know the Cockatrice was attacking another ship . . . how did you do this?”

  “We didn’t. We just got very, very lucky. Now it’s your turn.”

  “I can’t leave here. I need to be with this ship.”

  “This ship is going to blow up if one of us sneezes. Do you really want to be aboard when that happens?”

  “I still need to be here. Leave me alone, I’ll survive by myself. Conjoiners will find me again.”

  I shook my head firmly. “That isn’t going to happen. Even if this ship doesn’t blow up, you’re still drifting at twenty-five per cent of the speed of light. That’s too fast to get you back to Shiva-Parvati, even if there’s a shuttle aboard this thing. Too fast for anyone around Shiva-Parvati to come out and rescue you, too.”

  “I know this.”

  “Then you also know that you’re not moving anywhere near fast enough to actually get anywhere before your resources run out. Unless you think you can survive fifty years aboard this thing, until you swing by the next colonised system with no way of slowing down.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  A voice buzzed in my helmet. It was Van Ness, insisting that we return to the Petronel as quickly as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but if you don’t come willingly, I’m going to have to bring you in unconscious.” I raised the blunt muzzle of my slug-gun.

  “If there’s a tranquiliser dart in there, it won’t work on me. My nervous system isn’t like yours. I only sleep when I choose to.”

  “That’s what I figured. It’s why I dialled the dose to five times its normal strength. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to give it a try and see what happens.”

  Panic crossed her face. “Give me a suit,” she said. “Give me a suit and then leave me alone, if you really want to help.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “We don’t have names, Inigo. At least nothing you could get your tongue around.”

  “I’m willing to try.”

  “Give me a suit. Then leave me alone.”

  Van Ness started screaming in my ears again. I’d had enough. I pointed the muzzle at her, aiming for the flesh of her thigh, where she had her legs tucked under her. I squeezed the trigger and delivered the stun fléchette.

  “You fool,” she said. “You don’t understand. You have to leave me here, with this . . .”

  That was all she managed before slumping into unconsciousness. She’d gone down much faster than I’d expected, as if she’d already been on her last reserves of strength. I just hoped I hadn’t set the stun dose too high. It was already strong enough to kill any normal human being.

  Van Ness had been right to be concerned about our proximity to the Cockatrice. We’d barely doubled the distance between the two ships when her drive spar failed, allowing the port engine to drift away from its starboard counterpart. Several agonising minutes later, the distance between the two engine units exceeded sixteen hundred metres and the drives went up in a double burst that tested our shielding to its limits. The flash must have been visible all the way back to Shiva-Parvati.

  The girl had been unconscious right up until that moment, but when the engines went up she twitched on the bunk where we’d placed her, just as if she’d been experiencing a vivid and disturbing dream. The rilled structures on the side of her crest throbbed with vivid colours, each chasing the last. Then she was restful again, for many hours, and the play of colours calmer.

  I watched her sleeping. I’d never been near a Conjoiner before, let alone one like this. Aboard the ship, when we had been hunting her, she had seemed strong and potentially dangerous. Now she looked like some half-starved animal, driven to the brink of madness by hunger and something in finitely worse. There were awful bruises all over her body, some more recent than others. There were fine scars on her skull. One of her incisors was missing a point.

  Van Ness still wasn’t convinced of the wisdom of bringing her aboard, but even his dislike of Conjoiners didn’t extend to the notion of throwing her back into space. All the same, he insisted that she be bound to the bunk by heavy restraints, in an armoured room under the guard of a servitor, at least until we had some idea of who she was and how she had ended up aboard the pirate ship. He didn’t want heavily augmented crew anywhere near her, either: not when (as he evidently believed) she had the means to control any machine in her vicinity, and might therefore overpower or even commandeer any crewperson who had a skull full of implants. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell him: Conjoiners could talk to machines, yes, but not all machines, and the idea that they could work witchcraft on anything with a circuit inside it was just so much irrational fearmongering.

  Van Ness heard my reasoned objections, and then ignored them. I’m glad that he did, though. Had he listened to me, he might have put some other member of the crew in charge of questioning her, and then I wouldn’t have got to know her as well as I did. Because I only had the metal hand, the rest of me still flesh and blood, he deemed me safe from her influence.

  I was with her when she woke.

  I placed my left on her shoulder as she squirmed u
nder the restraints, suddenly aware of her predicament. “It’s all right,” I said softly. “You’re safe now. Captain made us put these on you for the time being, but we’ll get them off you as soon as we can. That’s a promise. I’m Inigo, by the way, shipmaster. We met before, but I’m not sure how much of that you remember.”

  “Every detail,” she said. Her voice was low, dark-tinged, untrusting.

  “Maybe you don’t know where you are. You’re aboard the Petronel. The Cockatrice is gone, along with everyone aboard her. Whatever they did to you, whatever happened to you aboard that ship, it’s over now.”

  “You didn’t listen to me.”

  “If we’d listened to you,” I said patiently, “you’d be dead by now.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  I’d been ready to give her the benefit of the doubt, but my reservoir of sympathy was beginning to dry up. “You know, it wouldn’t hurt to show a little gratitude. We put ourselves at considerable risk to get you to safety. We’d taken everything we needed from the pirates. We only went back in to help you.”

  “I didn’t need you to help me. I could have survived.”

  “Not unless you think you could have held that spar on by sheer force of will.”

  She hissed back her reply. “I’m a Conjoiner. That means the rules were different. I could have changed things. I could have kept the ship in one piece.”

  “To make a point?”

  “No,” she said, with acid slowness, as if that was the only speed I was capable of following. “Not to make a point. We don’t make points.”

  “The ship’s gone,” I said. “It’s over, so you may as well deal with it. You’re with us now. And no, you’re not our prisoner. We’ll do everything I said we would: take care of you, get you to safety, back to your people.”

  “You really think it’s that simple?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “The problem is I can’t ever go back. Is that simple enough for you?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Were you exiled from the Conjoiners, or something like that?”

  She shook her elaborately crested head, as if my question was the most naive thing she had ever heard. “No one gets exiled.”

  “Then tell me what the hell happened!”

  Anger burst to the surface. “I was taken, all right? I was stolen, snatched away from my people. Captain Voulage took me prisoner around Yellowstone, when the Cockatrice was docked near one of our ships. I was part of a small diplomatic party visiting Carousel New Venice. Voulage’s men ambushed us, split us up, then took me so far from the other Conjoiners that I dropped out of neural range. Have you any idea what that means to one of us?”

  I shook my head, not because I didn’t understand what she meant, but because I knew I could have no proper grasp of the emotional pain that severance must have caused. I doubted that pain was a strong enough word for the psychic shock associated with being ripped away from her fellows. Nothing in ordinary human experience could approximate the trauma of that separation, any more than a frog could grasp the loss of a loved one. Conjoiners spent their whole lives in a state of gestalt consciousness, sharing thoughts and experiences via a web of implant-mediated neural connections. They had individual personalities, but those personalities were more like the blurred identities of atoms in a metallic solid. Beyond the level of individual self was the state of higher mental union that they called Transenlightenment, analogous to the fizzing sea of dissociated electrons in that same metallic lattice. And the girl had been ripped away from that, forced to come to terms with existence as a solitary mind, an island once more.

  “I understand how bad it must have been,” I said. “But now you can go back. Isn’t that something worth looking forward to?”

  “You only think you understand. To a Conjoiner, what happened to me is the worst thing in the world. And now I can’t go back: not now, not ever. I’ve become damaged, broken, useless. My mind is permanently disfigured. It can’t be allowed to return to Transenlightenment.”

  “Why ever not? Wouldn’t they be glad to get you back?”

  She took a long time answering. In the quiet, I studied her face, watchful for anything that would betray the danger Van Ness clearly believed she posed. Now his fears seemed groundless. She looked smaller and more delicately boned than when we’d first glimpsed her on the Cockatrice. The strangeness of her, the odd shape of her hairless crested skull, should have been off-putting. In truth I found her fascinating. It was not her alienness that drew my furtive attention, but her very human face: her small and pointed chin, the pale freckles under her eyes, the way her mouth never quite closed, even when she was silent. The olive green of her eyes was a shade so dark that from certain angles it became a lustrous black, like the surface of coal.

  “No,” she said, answering me finally. “It wouldn’t work. I’d upset the purity of the others, spoil the harmony of the neural connections, like a single out-of-tune instrument in an orchestra. I’d make everyone else start playing out of key.”

  “I think you’re being too fatalistic. Shouldn’t we at least try to find some other Conjoiners and see what they say?”

  “That isn’t how it works,” she said. “They’d have to take me back, yes, if I presented myself to them. They’d do it out of kindness and compassion. But I’d still end up harming them. It’s my duty not to allow that to happen.”

  “Then you’re saying you have to spend the rest of your life away from other Conjoiners, wandering the universe like some miserable excommunicated pilgrim?”

  “There are more of us than you realise.”

  “You do a good job keeping out of the limelight. Most people only see Conjoiners in groups, all dressed in black like a flock of crows.”

  “Maybe you aren’t looking in the right places.”

  I sighed, aware that nothing I said was going to convince her that she would be better off returning to her people. “It’s your life, your destiny. At least you’re alive. Our word still holds: we’ll drop you at the nearest safe planet, when we next make orbitfall. If that isn’t satisfactory to you, you’d be welcome to remain aboard ship until we arrive somewhere else.”

  “Your captain would allow that? I thought he was the one who wanted to leave the wreck before you’d found me.”

  “I’ll square things with the captain. He isn’t the biggest fan of Conjoiners, but he’ll see sense when he realises you aren’t a monster.”

  “Does he have a reason not to like me?”

  “He’s an old man,” I said simply.

  “Riven with prejudice, you mean?”

  “In his way,” I said, shrugging. “But don’t blame him for that. He lived through the bad years, when your people were first coming into existence. I think he had some first-hand experience of the trouble that followed.”

  “Then I envy him those first-hand memories. Not many of us are still alive from those times. To have lived through those years, to have breathed the same air as Remontoire and the others . . .” She looked away sadly. “Remontoire’s gone now. So are Galiana and Nevil. We don’t know what happened to any of them.”

  I knew she must have been talking about pivotal figures from earlier Conjoiner history, but the people of whom she spoke meant nothing to me. To her, cast so far downstream from those early events on Mars, the names must have held something of the resonance of saints or apostles. I thought I knew something of Conjoiners, but they had a long and complicated internal history of which I was totally ignorant.

  “I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did,” I said. “But that was then and this is now. We don’t hate or fear you. If we did, we wouldn’t have risked our necks getting you out of the Cockatrice.”

  “No, you don’t hate or fear me,” she replied. “But you still think I might be useful to you, don’t you?”

  “Only if you wish to help us.”

  “Captain Voulage thought that I might have the e
xpertise to improve the performance of his ship.”

  “Did you?” I asked innocently.

  “By increments, yes. He showed me the engines and . . . encouraged me to make certain changes. You told me you are a shipmaster, so you doubtless have some familiarity with the principles involved.”

  I thought back to the adjustments I had made to our own engines, when we still had ambitions of fleeing the pirates. The memory of my trembling hand on those three critical dials felt as if it had been dredged from deepest antiquity, rather than something that had happened only days earlier.

  “When you say ‘encouraged’ . . .” I began.

  “He found ways to coerce me. It is true that Conjoiners can control their perception of pain by applying neural blockades. But only to a degree, and then only when the pain has a real physical origin. If the pain is generated in the head, using a reverse-field trawl, our defences are useless. ” She looked at me with a sudden hard intensity, as if daring me to imagine one-tenth of what she had experienced. “It is like locking a door when the wolf is already in the house.”

  “I’m sorry. You must have been through hell.”

  “I only had the pain to endure,” she said. “I’m not the one anyone needs to feel sorry about.”

  The remark puzzled me, but I let it lie. “I have to get back to our own engines now,” I said, “but I’ll come to see you later. In the meantime, I think you should rest.” I snapped a duplicate communications bracelet from my wrist and placed it near her hand, where she could reach it. “If you need me, you can call into this. It’ll take me a little while to get back here, but I’ll come as quickly as possible. ”

  She lifted her forearm as far as it would go, until the restraints stiffened. “And these?”

  “I’ll talk to Van Ness. Now that you’re lucid, now that you’re talking to us, I don’t see any further need for them.”

  “Thank you,” she said again. “Inigo. Is that all there is to your name? It’s rather a short one, even by the standards of the retarded.”

  “Inigo Standish, shipmaster. And you still haven’t told me your name.”

  “I told you: it’s nothing you could understand. We have our own names now, terms of address that can only be communicated in the Transenlightenment. My name is a flow of experiential symbols, a string of interiorised qualia, an expression of a particular dynamic state that has only ever happened under a conjunction of rare physical conditions in the atmosphere of a particular kind of gas giant planet. I chose it myself. It’s considered very beautiful and a little melancholy, like a haiku in five dimensions.”